Strategic leadership towards sustainability - individuals, organizations, and communities using systems thinking to create a better future that is peaceful, healthy, prosperous, just, equitable, and resilient for generations to come.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Culture Shift: Why culture trumps technology in moving markets

This great video of Rebecca Henderson's talk at VERGE is worth the 10 minutes. She lays out four elements of a needed cultural shift:

Adopt an entrepreneurial mindset

Develop compassion for the core (e.g. the mainstream, the status-quo, those who don't see the need for change)

Become rational about emotions

Develop a systems mindset

Henderson explains each of these concisely in her talk below, and stresses, that like the "fifth discipline" the need for a systems mindset is the most important.

Moving groups, organizations, and societies as a whole towards sustainability requires great collaboration and profound shifts in worldviews, values, and mental models (e.g. habits of thought, assumptions and blind spots). I believe we have everything we need in terms of resources, tools, technology to create a sustainable society (though continuing to work and improve on those fronts is important, beneficial, and can potentially make the shift easier) -- and that we still have lots to do in bringing about the culture shift.

That calls on us all to be open and provide leadership at all levels. Those acts of leadership often involve simply being strong enough to let go of assumptions and preconceived notions; to rethink success, and reevaluate what our fundamental needs are, and how we can most effectively go about meeting them.